set drive active?

[dbarton]

Some of my drives are set active and others are not..


c: says healthy (system)
d: says healthy
e: says healthy (active)

my boot drive doesnt say active
Is there any problem with this?

is it bad to have a non boot drive active?
if not, why not have all drives *always* be active and why even ask us?

 

[blackangst1]

Im gonna make a few assumptions here.

Youre using Windows.
Your D drive is a CD or DVD drive
Your E drive is 2nd storage HD.

That said, Windows wont install but anything other than the C drive, and will assume its active...unless its broke.

Any other HD will show active if it is accessible.

 

[dbarton]

no, these are all hard drives

I simplified it a bit for clarity, but here the real layout:

[ide physical drive]
c fat32 healthy active

[sata physical drive]
d ntfs healthy
e ntfs healthy
f ntfs healthy

[ide physical drive]
g fat32 healthy active
h fat32 healthy

I must have made G is active.

I'm not really worried, as it works fine, but I just wonder why we even get an option to makes disk active if there's no pronblem in them all being active.

 

[Navid]

Originally posted by: dbarton
I'm not really worried, as it works fine, but I just wonder why we even get an option to makes disk active if there's no pronblem in them all being active.

When you turn on a computer, the hard drive that is first in the boot order list is accessed by the BIOS. The master boot record on this hard drive looks at the partition table and selects the primary partition that is active. The OS is loaded from that active partition.

That is why you cannot have more than one active partition on each physical drive at a time.

 

[Nothinman]

That is why you cannot have more than one active partition on each physical drive at a time.

Actually you can, it's just a toggle bit in the partition table and it can be toggled on for all of them at once if you have software that will let you do it. I have a vague recollection of doing that before and IIRC it just booted from the first active partition.

 

[pallejr]

if you look at this disassembly of a standard mbr, you will get an "invalid partition table" msg if more than one partition is marked as active

http://ata-atapi.com/hiwmbr.htm

 

[Nothinman]

Depends on where your MBR code comes from, the code from MS definitely does that but not all do. I just did an installation of Ubuntu in VMWare so that I could test a few things and when it was done I noticed that no partitions were marked active but it still booted fine. Then I set both partitions to active and rebooted and it still came up just fine.

 

[pallejr]

That might be. I haven't looked at all of them. I just found one that is standard for Windows, which was the OS discussed here

 

[dbarton]

So, bottom line is that I should set a drive as having an active partion if i ever plan to boot from it..

Is there than some reason not to set every physical drive as active, just in case?

If no disadvantage, why doesn't the OS just set every drive as active and let the bios select the one to boot to?

 

[Nothinman]

So, bottom line is that I should set a drive as having an active partion if i ever plan to boot from it..

Well the partition you're booting from should be active, but if you've only got Windows on the drive then it's likely already set for you.

Is there than some reason not to set every physical drive as active, just in case?

If no disadvantage, why doesn't the OS just set every drive as active and let the bios select the one to boot to?

It's not the drive that's active, it's a partition on that drive.

 

[dbarton]

>It's not the drive that's active, it's a partition on that drive.

Aha!

But still no disadvantage to having an active partiton on a drive that just a storage drive, right?

 

[Nothinman]

But still no disadvantage to having an active partiton on a drive that just a storage drive, right?

You'll just get a different error message if you ever try to boot off of it than if no partition was active.